The RTO debate has a new point of contention, it seems. At CNBC’s recent Workforce Executive Council Summit, Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck said that her team has been more successful overall and even better at hitting deadlines since moving to a fully distributed model. But that came at a price, she added: “We are less creative.”  That’s not an uncommon opinion among executives, especially those whose companies went remote for a long period of time during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a shareholder letter in 2020, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote that remote work “virtu ..read more

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Annie Dean, Atlassian’s VP of Team Anywhere, made it clear that the Australia-based software company’s future is distributed.  Dean was a proponent of flexible work long before she came to the company known for collaboration tools like Trello and Jira, but in the years before the pandemic, her point of view just wasn’t catching on. Even in the early weeks of 2020, Dean was doubting whether remote work would ever catch on: “You have to think about where we were. CIOs did not have Zoom links in calendars as a matter of default. People were still lar ..read more

In a recent post to the Roblox company blog, founder and CEO David Baszucki mandated that the large majority of Roblox’s remote employees return to a physical office in 2024. Citing concerns about “Zoom fatigue” and lack of creative collaboration, he concluded that “we aren’t there yet” when it comes to a remote work technology that works. Roblox has been doing great work for years fostering digital connection among its users. However, this is not a technology problem. It’s a culture problem.  As an Automattician, I couldn’t help but notice this line in particular:  “A three-hour Gr ..read more

In a recently published article, The New York Times offered a brief overview of some things society has learned (or not) about remote work. More than three years after the pandemic kicked off what reporter Emma Goldberg calls “a mass workplace experiment,” plenty of companies have yet to figure out what works—either for employees or for productivity. For employers, productivity concerns outweigh most others—no surprise there—but the studies conducted thus far have been anything but consistent. Results range from productivity declines of 19 percent to gains as high as 24 percent. (Commence the ..read more

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. On this episode of Distributed, we dig into the good, the bad, and the karaoke-filled history of Automattic meetups. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, our annual Grand Meetup brought the entire company together for a week. The time spent together — along with team-specific meetups scattered throughout the year — helped us strengthen relationships with our colleagues located around the world. Now, as companies and workers grapple with returning to the office, it’s a perfect chance to conside ..read more

Back in April, when entire sectors of the economy had just recently — and abruptly — transitioned to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Matt Mullenweg shared an aspirational roadmap, describing the five levels of autonomy companies go through along their journey from fully colocated to truly distributed. With increasing signs that we might never go back to the old normal, Enrique Dans, at Forbes, reflects on what executives and employees alike have learned in the intervening months. He takes Matt’s five levels as a starting point to ask how our collective understanding of remote work ha ..read more

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Is working from home a breakthrough for introverts? The answer, of course, is not so simple. Matt Mullenweg’s latest Distributed conversation is with Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents from Harvard Business Review, and founder of award-winning social impact agency Women Online and its database of women influencers, The Mission List. She’s also the author of Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home). To learn more about Aa ..read more

As millions of people have switched to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as their employers decide whether to continue this model indefinitely, many U.S. cities are seeing an opportunity to bring well-paid remote workers to their region.  Tulsa, Oklahoma, is one example. The Tulsa Remote program, launched in 2018 and funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, offers $10,000 for remote workers or entrepreneurs from outside Oklahoma to move to the city. Shoals, Alabama, is another city offering a similar remote worker program — $10,000 to move to the city within six mo ..read more

As the world continues to work from home, podcasts are serving as a helpful diversion to listen to when we’re washing dishes or walking the dog.  They’re fairly easy to produce from home, too.  Many of the conversations we’ve featured on the Distributed podcast have taken place over Zoom, with each of us calling in from our respective home cities. In the spirit of transparency, we thought we’d share some of our best practices and must-have equipment: LOCATION  In many ways, where you’re recording your interview is just as important, if not more important, than any fancy equipmen ..read more

“What’s enabled by being distributed that’s more powerful?” In this preview episode from next season’s Masters of Scale, Matt speaks with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, about navigating distributed work during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more go to mastersofscale.com ..read more